The Obama administration has been forced, once again, to make a false choice between our ideals and our security, and like President Bush before him, Obama chose security. In January White House counsel Greg Craig was telling reporters that this administration would reserve the right to "retain and detain" those prisoners who could not be tried or released. That's still true, but this White House would like to have its cake and eat it too. So now comes news that for those detainees that the administration does put on trial, the president may invoke his "post-acquittal detention power."

I understand and respect the president's decision to disregard his left-wing critics and embrace the same policies of indefinite detention and denial of due process that made the Bush-Cheney administration so effective in preventing another terror attack. I support those policies because as illegal enemy combatants, terrorists have no right to due process. But, as Glenn Greenwald points out, there is something Orwellian about this administration's attempt to have it both ways -- to get the credit for putting detainees on trial only to disregard the outcome if they don't like the verdict. Obviously the Bush administration would have done the same if they thought for a second that they could get away with it. But even the Bush OLC wouldn't have dared suggest detaining individuals who had been acquitted on all charges.

So the Bush administration simply detained individuals it deemed a threat to national security. It was unable to resolve this difficult question of how to proceed with detainees who were too dangerous to release but against whom the evidence was, for any number of totally legitimate reasons, not likely to secure a conviction. The Obama administration has worked out a brilliant solution: show trials whose outcomes will not be predetermined even if the sentencing is.

Update: What are the president's post-acquittal interrogation powers?